


Clair de Lune

by Archosaur



Category: Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Femslash, Femslash February, Femslash February 2021, Fireflies, First Kiss, Getting Together, Introspection, POV Second Person, Romance, basically Clarisse doesn't die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:13:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29003541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archosaur/pseuds/Archosaur
Summary: I had nothingAnd I was still changed.Like a costume, mynumbness was taken away. Thenhunger was added.The Mutable Earth, Louise GlückThere has always been something missing from your life. It just takes meeting her to figure that out.
Relationships: Clarisse McClellan/Female Reader, Clarisse McClellan/Reader, Guy Montag & Clarisse McClellan (Mentioned)





	Clair de Lune

**Author's Note:**

> One of my goals for 2021 was to write and publish a work of fanfiction and for some reason, the only piece of media I have any inspiration to write for is a book that I was forced to read over a year ago for English. Most characters, story points, metaphors, and locations are based on those in the book but a few creative liberties were taken and real-life details added for worldbuilding purposes to fill in the gaps.
> 
> I’d like to thank the song Spirits by the Strumbellas, and Fireflies by Owl City for providing the soundtrack for this story’s development and also a concerning amount of the plot. The title is from the classical composition Clair de Lune by Debussy, and from the poem of the same name by Paul Verlaine.
> 
> This isn't beta read so if you find a mistake please point it out. Anyways, enjoy!

_“They seem not to believe in their own happiness_

_And their song blends with the light of the moon,”_

**_Clair de lune, Paul Verlaine_ **

It takes two scans of the area for you to notice the girl sitting in the corner of the classroom. She’s beside the window, looking out of it with an expression that you can’t place. You’ve never seen her before, but new students are all too common. Teenagers coming and going like migratory birds. She might have even been an old student who had only just chosen this time to start showing up, there are just as many of those as well. The seat beside her is the only one left so you stride beside it and, in a single motion, drop your school bag and sit down. Turning your head over to her side you finally get a better look at the girl next to you. She looks washed out under the glow of the electric lights. Pale, almost sickly. A piece of coral bleached of all colour. She seems out of place in this environment. A puzzle piece meant for a different image, forced into a spot that doesn’t quite fit. 

****

She turns to you, presumably finally noticing your blatant staring, and her wandering eyes rove around your body before settling on your eyes. “Clarisse McClellan. You’re my new deskmate, right? I like your shirt, by the way, it’s a very nice shade.”

****

“Yeah I am, and thanks I guess,” you respond incredulously, rendered off-kilter by both her talkativeness and forwardness. You usually don’t talk to any classmate you weren’t already friends with, finding yourself perfectly content to just ignore them and get on with your day. “Is today your first day?” 

****

“Yes it is,” she answers before continuing with details that you never asked for, “It’s also my first week in the city. We had to move after my uncle got arrested. He’d been arrested before but the police in our last city started getting tired of us after his latest arrest, so we left,” she says.

****

“What did he get arrested for?” You ask, not really interested in the answer but wanting to be polite. You know how small talk works, and once you exhaust any surface conversation topic you can transition into ignoring her existence.

****

“Driving too slow on a highway. He wanted to get a good look at the plants growing on the sides when he was pulled over.”

****

Your eyes widen in surprise and you let out an involuntary laugh. You didn’t know what you were expecting but it certainly wasn’t that. “I didn’t know that was a crime.”

****

Her lips curl into a playful smile, painfully genuine in its craftsmanship. “Neither did he.” 

****

**O————**

****

“You don’t want to be here do you?” 

****

It’s TV class now, and your classmates are a quarter way through a fifteen-minute long live-action dramatization of some war or another. The enemy is being decimated by missiles engraved with product placement on the sides while the main characters cheer and watch the destruction unfold. But instead of paying attention to the screen, you’re looking at her. She’s kept to her seat so far but her twitching fingertips and jittery leg allude to a barely contained energy that betrays her desire to leave. 

****

She cocks her head to the side, “Here as in school or here as in the city?”

****

“School I mean,” you clarify.

****

“No, but my parents say that I need to try it at least once before stopping,” she explains, “And my uncle always says that you need to experience something at least once before you write it off.”

****

“Why don’t you like school?” You ask, a frown making its way onto your face.

****

She directs her gaze towards the cloth-covered windows. “It’s a waste of time, it’s not like they teach you anything here.”

****

You blink in confusion. “We learn plenty at school,” you tell her, “That’s the whole point of being here.”

****

“They do teach you things,” she concedes, stressing the ‘you’, “But nothing useful, and nothing true. This whole place is just a factory keeping you busy and tired, programming you with just enough information to be useful and not a drop more.”

****

“That’s not true,” you argue, strangely defensive considering that you’ve never been that attached to school in the first place.

****

“Then tell me, what have you learned today? Really learned I mean, not repeated or just told upfront.”

****

You open your mouth to answer before stopping. What have you learned today? Desperately you wrack your mind for anything but come up empty. Most of your classes either involved sports or dramatized informational movies like the one that was playing now. The teachers were really only there to give the instructions and work the electronic systems built into the classrooms. Your mouth closes, defeated. You don’t have an answer to give.

****

The look she gives you isn’t one of victory or superiority, it’s pity. You wish it were anything else; pity is so much worse. And looking up into her eyes you can see yourself reflected within the mirrors of those deep-brown irises. You look like a child lost in a mega-mall, scared and adrift in a faceless crowd. And right now that’s exactly how you feel. Some invisible tether inside of you has begun to fray and even though you don’t know what it is you don’t know if you can live without it.

****

You snap your head forward, your gut twisting up in knots, and refocus on the senseless violence that flashes on the screen. You try and fail to purge the conversation from your memory. 

****

**O————**

****

You breathe into your cupped hands and rub them together vigorously in an attempt to warm up. You had spent most of the evening with your friends, losing track of time as darkness crept over you, and as the sun leaves, taking its warmth with it, the bite of the air becomes far more noticeable. Deciding to take a shortcut through an abandoned neighbourhood park that’s been scheduled for renovation for a few years now you expect to find nothing but the same unkempt barrenness you’ve grown accustomed to. But instead of an empty field, you’re met with her. Gone is the deathly pallor that the artificial light brought to her skin. Under the moonlight, she comes alive. A butterfly emerging from its chrysalis into a new life, a changed body. Her hair tumbles past her shoulders in an avalanche of pale blonde, a white dress flutters like paper just above her knees, and her dark eyes are twin coals caught in a snowbank. 

****

Her gaze is locked upon the blades of grass below her, but as your footsteps grow closer it switches to you. She looks at you, really looks at you, and for a moment you freeze midstep. You want to run away from her but you can't force yourself to move, feeling as though you’ve been trapped in a jet car’s head beams. You stare at each other for what feels like an eternity until eventually a smile tugs her lips upwards and she speaks. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

****

“Neither did I,” you reply tentatively, the urge to flee still coursing through your veins, “I didn’t know you lived in the neighbourhood.”

****

“Oh I don’t,” she clarifies, “But I like to wander, see more than just what is around my backyard. The area where I live is nice and all but the people never seem to come out. I’ve seen one of them leaving at odd times but I’ve never been able to catch them. At least not yet. And besides, the fireflies don’t come to my neighbourhood.”

****

Despite your best efforts to conceal your confusion, your furrowed eyebrows betray you.

****

Clarisse cocks her head slightly to the side before she responds. “Do you not know what fireflies are?” She asks not unkindly.

****

You flush slightly, feeling foolish even though she didn’t seem to judge your lack of knowledge. “No,” you admit, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

****

“They are a type of beetle,” she explains, “They emerge around this time every year, but they only live for a few weeks so I’ll need to be timely if I want to see them.”

****

“Wait, why are they called fireflies if they’re a beetle?” You ask, shifting the focus of your confusion.

****

“People thought that they were a fly when they first saw them. They were wrong but since so many already knew them by that name they didn’t want to change it. And they aren’t called that everywhere, in some places they’re known as lightning bugs, in others fire devils. And those are just the ones in English, there are even more if you add in other languages.”

****

That explained the incorrect name at least, but you still didn’t understand what it was about a bug that would make Clarisse so interested in it that she’d hike all the way out here just to see them. “What’s so special about them anyway, aren’t they just bugs?”

****

“No bug is just a bug,” she answers, “There’s always something interesting in every creature but fireflies are particularly fascinating.”

****

“Why?”

****

She looks at me for a moment, eyebrows scrunched up in thought before they relax, some internal conclusion obviously reached. She turns to fully face me and raises her hand into the space between the two of you, “Come with me and I’ll show you.”

****

You hesitate for a moment but curiosity wins out against caution and you take the offered proposal, fingers slotting together like an emulsifier forcing oil and water to become one single mixture.

****

She leads you down a faintly visible path as the moon begins to take its place as the new lord of the sky. You disentangle your hands as you reach her destination and take in the sight before you.

****

The clearing is awash with light. Tiny orbs blink as they flit around the air and, in some cases, settling on the green spears of the swaying grass.

****

“What? What are these? Are they robots?” You ask, tearing your gaze from the zipping lights to look over at Clarisse. The lights flash like LEDs but they don’t move like any drone you’ve ever seen before.

****

Clarisse smiles, obviously amused by your wonder and confusion. “They’re fireflies. No electronics are making this light, it’s alive, it’s real.”

****

Your eyes return to the fireflies and you can’t keep your mouth from dropping open in awe. Your family takes you every year to see the annual light show over at the arena. It’s big, it’s large but somehow it can’t even hold a candle to the small wonder in front of you now.

****

“My uncle used to see them all the time,” she tells you, “At he and Mom’s childhood home. They used to go out to the lake every summer night when they were out and stay up until sunrise watching them. This is my first time seeing them in person. There used to be more of them everywhere, but then developers built houses where they used to live, and the bright electric lights from the building prevent them from communicating with each other properly since their lights get drowned out.”

****

“I didn’t know,” you whisper. 

****

“Almost no one does,” she says with a shrug, “Most people are too caught up in their own lives to notice anything outside of it.” She then reaches out her hands, eyes focused on one of the beetles that were flying at neck-level in front of her. And all at once, she pounces, as a cat would upon a bird or mouse, and her hands close around the bug. She turns to you, eyes alight with triumph, and asks, “Would you like to hold one?”

****

You nod excitedly and she makes her way over to you. She stops less than an arm's length away and her clasped hands unfurl like a flower under the light of the sun or the moon in this case. Your hands brush as she transfers the insect from her palms to your own. A tiny variable star now crawls around, cupped in the palms of your hands. A campfire spark trapped within the body of an insect. It doesn’t emit any heat but somehow you still feel warmer. You look up at her, beaming at you, and you don’t think you’ll ever be cold again.

****

**O————**

****

“I just talked to my neighbour,” Clarisse announces from where she sits on the soft earth across from you. A dandelion crown that she had woven together earlier rests on her brow, tangled in her pale blonde hair that looks almost white under the midday sun. “I’d been watching him for a few nights now while he came from work but he didn’t notice me until yesterday.”

****

“Oh,” you say, mildly interested but more focussed on the way her fingers thread through the slender blades of grass. “Who is it?”

****

“He’s a fireman, I could tell from the smell of kerosene. Quite a morbid perfume to wear but he said that it never really comes off. Makes them easy to identify I suppose” she answers, plucking out a dandelion and rolling it between her thumb and index finger, staining them with smudges of green.

****

You’ve never met a fireman before, but you’ve passed by the station while driving around, and occasionally even stolen a glimpse of the fire truck racing down the streets on late nights. And you’ve heard the stories like everyone else. Firemen incinerating criminals in their own homes, dousing people in gasoline then setting them ablaze for the crime of owning books. You shudder just a little bit. You’ve never been burned alive before and you have no intention of becoming the victim of such a witch trial. “What’s he like?” You ask one-part politeness and the other curiosity.

****

She looks contemplative for a moment, eyes focussing on some point beyond the horizon line, perhaps beyond the bounds of the sky itself. “He looked sad, lost. Kind of like you did during that conversation we had about school.”

****

With those words, you feel a new sense of kinship with this fireman. You’ve never felt freer than in the recent weeks that you’ve spent with her. Not realizing how miserable you had been before leaving that cave.

****

There was a comfortable lull in the conversation. Silence used to unsettle you, always needing the background noise of conversation, music, the television or radio to keep it from weighing upon you. But now you allow it to settle between the two of you, occasionally interrupted by the quiet whistles of the wind.

****

She fiddles with a dandelion’s stem between her fingers. “Did you know that if a dandelion rubs off under your chin it means that you’re in love?”

****

“No, I didn’t,” you answer. You flash her a teasing smile, “Did your uncle tell you that too?”

****

She lets out a quick laugh, clear and delicate as the morning dew, but shakes her head. “My mom actually. Her side of the family has always been the romantics and she’s no exception to that.”

****

She always talks about her family so fondly and you wish you could think of your own that way. If coming home had felt like a chore when you wasted away your nights breaking windows and running over abandoned bicycles it was near excruciating after you met her. You tried to tell them about her once after the night with the fireflies but they didn’t seem to pay attention, and if they did they certainly didn’t show it. In some ways meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to you, but sometimes, laying in bed with painful thoughts meandering around your once clear mind, you wish you hadn’t. Sometimes you wish that she didn’t point at the seams holding your world together and prod you to pick at them until all the pillars holding it aloft came crashing down. But in more ways, you are grateful for her. And even though you’ve lost things you once thought you couldn’t live without along the way you’ve also gained something far greater, something more real. You think that you’ve finally found something worth needing, worth keeping.

****

“Can I try it on you?” She asks looking at you with that keen smile of hers, “I’ve never tried it on someone else before and this is the perfect opportunity to do so.”

****

All at once, you are both afraid and exciting, nerves alight with anticipation. Your desire to say yes creates a perfect balance to your sudden wish to run far far away. “Ok,” you finally choke out, “Yeah you can do it.”

****

She smiles and you can’t find it within you to regret your decision no matter the consequences that might arise.

****

She’s a living candle, and her warmth covers you like the memory of a blanket you once held onto as a child. As she shuffles closer the heat grows stronger, as does the scent of grass and pollen. Face-to-face you’re close enough to touch the fabric of her dress if you wish. To move in and close the space between you. Your hands clasp the edge of your shirt to resist the urge to trace the edges that flutter as gently as the wings of a moth. She brings the dandelion to your chin and rubs it gently, carefully. You hold your breath but can’t entirely suppress the giggles that escape. After a moment she leans back to observe her handiwork.

****

“You’re in love,” she declares with a blinding grin. Your heart stutters and races but does not stop beating its staccato rhythm from behind the bars of your ribcage. It worked, she’s right. 

****

**O————**

****

“Come on, it’s not that hard.”

****

You shoot her an upward glare as you attempt to steady yourself on the branch beneath your feet, “Easy for you to say, you’ve done this before.”

****

She laughs at your theatrics. You’d never met someone who laughed or smiled half as much as she does. Your family reserved all their joy for the programs upon the parlour walls, and your old friends only seemed happy when they were driving far too fast to control the wheel beneath their fingers on a late-night road. She smiles at anything, the wind rustling through her hair, a sudden rainfall that catches one by surprise, and you. You hoard all of her smiles in the depths of your memory, yours to keep and treasure. 

****

You haul yourself upwards to meet her, high as you two could go without risking a fall. Sitting beside her in the light of the setting sun, you watch darkness seep into the blue sky as her herbal tea does to a cup of water.

****

“Can I ask you a question?” You ask, hands twisting into knots.

****

Her head tilts to the side, allowing her hair to better reflect the light of the ever-dying star, “Ok, what is it?”

****

You pause, collecting your courage, before saying “Have you ever thought about the future?”

****

She freezes, and you’re about to begin your list of pre-planned apologies when she answers, “I never thought that I’d get to have one,” she admits, eyes downcast “Always thought that I'd die young or spend my days in and out of prison, like my uncle.” She raises her head to look at you with an almost wistful expression on her face, “People like me don’t have much of a future in a place like this.”

****

Your eyes flick over to finally meet hers, and they’re no longer the mirror they were before. There is no one reflected within them but herself. You remember the day you met her, only a month ago but it feels like far longer. She was an anchor to you in the beginning, but now it’s your turn to be a lighthouse, to be more than the flesh and blood you’ve been trapped within. You reach over and take her hand in your own. No emulsifier is needed now, you fall into her easily. You’ve gotten quite good at falling.

****

“I feel the same way, now I mean,” you admit, “My future had always been a given before, set in stone from the day I was born. I’d finish school, get a job, get married, have children, retire and that would be it.” You let out a huff and shake your head, hair swaying with the movement. 

****

The girl who met her that day barely feels like you, and in some ways, she isn’t. You’ve changed so much in so few months, and you’re changing still. It’s something you haven’t quite made peace with yet but it’s a work in progress like everything else in life. All you know is that without her none of this would have come to pass, you know you never want to leave her side. 

****

“But it’s not just you Clarisse,” you reassure, squeezing her hands softly, “You have your family.” You pause for a moment before saying the next words slightly softer, “And you have me, no matter what happens you’ll always have me.”

****

There’s adrenaline pumping through your veins but somehow it is not at all like driving in a fast car or doing a loop at the Fun Park. The world around you slows and dims until she is the only thing in focus. She blinks once, then twice, then thrice. You both lean in, lips meeting in the middle, and you catch flame. You wonder if when the fires ravaging your heart die down there will be anything left of you to save. You hope there isn’t. 

****

You don’t know what the future might hold, or if the both of you would even have one. But right now that doesn’t matter. Right now there is only you and her, and you think that as long as it stays that way, everything might be alright. And even if it isn’t it will always be better than before.

****

A starling perches atop a nearby tree, singing all the while.

****

**^**

**( )**

**O————**

**Author's Note:**

> And then they run away with Clarisse’s family, find the Living Library group, and live happily ever after. The End. 
> 
> Resources to learn more about fireflies and their conservation:  
> https://www.firefly.org/common-names-of-fireflies.html  
> https://www.firefly.org/facts-about-fireflies.html#:~:text=Fireflies%20love%20warm%2C%20humid%20areas,on%20all%20continents%20except%20Antarctica.  
> https://cwf-fcf.org/en/resources/encyclopedias/fauna/insects/firefly.html?gclid=Cj0KCQiAmL-ABhDFARIsAKywVaceyrJxs6rATlv7Eou9XKsPZOqN0ZVCmUXUYSKZonnNz7DoNA0QkW8aArz1EALw_wcB  
> http://www.xerces.org/endangered-species/fireflies/how-you-can-help


End file.
